e railed at her; artists, from Titian to
Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to
Congreve and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists,
from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni, have poured out
their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been
missed hitherto.

Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type.
Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die.
She is false in sentiment and in art, but she is tender after all; poor,
feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity. A slender, helpless,
breathless, and frail thing who, under one sad, short sin, sinks down to
death.

But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day.
Frou-frou is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that
Moliere would have handed down to other generations in enduring
ridicule, had he been living now. To her he would have doffed his hat
with dim eyes; what he would have fastened for all time in his pillory
would have been a very different, and far more conspicuous offender.

The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor
Frou-frou, who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has
studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic
virtues; who takes her wearied lover to her friends' houses as she takes
her muff or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by
familiar names; who writes to the victim of her passions with the same
pen that calls her boy home from school; and who smooths her child's
curls with the same fingers that stray over her lover's lips; who
challenges the world to find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her
husband's table on a society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven
the most sacred ties and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid,
that none can say where one commences or the other ends; who uses the
sanctity of her maternity to cover the lawlessness of her license; and
who, incapable alike of the self-abandonment of love or of the
self-sacrifice of duty, has not even such poor, cheap honour as, in the
creatures of the streets, may make guilt loyal to its dupe and partner.

This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on
her husband's arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast; and
ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a smile of Friendship.
Beside her Fr